The PRC will likely pursue standards leadership — its 5G strategy is the playbook. The U.S. Clean Network initiative previously checked Huawei/ZTE in core infrastructure across allies. In AI, however, the gap is smaller : the U.S. has more compute and often stronger frontier models at present, while open, steerable models (e.g., Qwen , DeepSeek ) have mattered in diffusion. So, winning the standards/diffusion race is key.